Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams

Language: English

Pages: 368

ISBN: 1591843677

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub

The acclaimed bestseller that's teaching the world about the power of mass collaboration.

Translated into more than twenty languages and named one of the best business books of the year by reviewers around the world, Wikinomics has become essential reading for business people everywhere. It explains how mass collaboration is happening not just at Web sites like Wikipedia and YouTube, but at traditional companies that have embraced technology to breathe new life into their enterprises.

This national bestseller reveals the nuances that drive wikinomics, and share fascinating stories of how masses of people (both paid and volunteer) are now creating TV news stories, sequencing the human gnome, remixing their favorite music, designing software, finding cures for diseases, editing school texts, inventing new cosmetics, and even building motorcycles.

nature of work itself is changing. Work has become more cognitively complex, more team-based and collaborative, more dependent on social skills, more time pressured, more reliant on technological competence, more mobile, and less dependent on geography. Many employees are already given far more autonomy to decide how and where they want to work. A growing number of firms are decentralizing their decision-making function, communicating in a peer-to-peer fashion, and embracing new technologies that

sector. ” Even if public ownership of key aspects of the transportation network forecloses opportunities for private profit, the gains to the rest of the economy make these losses look minuscule. For Torvalds, Linux is like a utility. It provides the basic infrastructure on which software developers can build applications and businesses. “It allows commercial entities to compete in areas that they really can add value to, and at the same time, they can take all the ‘basic stuff’ for granted,” he

internally to turn the latest scientific breakthroughs into products the market wanted. They rarely looked outside for new ideas or inventions. One might even argue that they didn’t need to. After all, the important advances in technology were already happening inside large, well-funded industrial R&D machines such as Bell Labs and Xerox PARC. The labs of firms like DuPont and Merck attracted the most talented Ph.D. graduates from the leading universities from which they harnessed the

reach similar milestones? Navi Radjou, Forrester’s leading innovation expert, has suggested that companies shift their innovation mind-set from “everything invented here” to “nothing invented here.” While we are optimistic about the potential for open innovation, we think this goes too far, perhaps even dangerously so. Companies that invent get an opportunity to shape the future. They don’t need to invent everything in-house, own all of the IP, or employ all of the people that contribute to

creativity.” As interesting as Lessig’s comments were, it was the venue in which he made them that is truly remarkable. Despite appearances, Lessig and his host are not members of a cultlike hippy enclave in a remote part of New Mexico. Lessig was appearing, not in person, but as an avatar in a virtual stadium, and the hundred-plus residents who came to listen in were all virtual avatars as well. All of them were participating in a virtual world of their own making—a massively multiplayer online